Tag Archives: UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing

At the newly launched UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing – or VisComp – researchers are building a future when photograph-quality images can be rendered instantly on mobile devices; a future in which computers and wearable devices have the ability to see and understand the physical world just as humans do; and a future in which real and virtual media content merge seamlessly across different platforms.

The opportunities in communication, health and medicine, city planning, entertainment, 3D printing and more are vast in this emerging field of ‘visual computing’ that pulls together computer vision, computer graphics, and virtual reality.

The director of VisComp and professor of Computer Science and Engineering Ravi Ramamoorthi, who produced breakthroughs that are now widely adopted by the movie and video game industries to recreate the visual appearance of the world, is
joined by two other faculty members on the interdisciplinary roster of VisComp: Cognitive Science professor Zhuowen Tu, and Qualcomm Institute research scientist Jurgen Schulze, who also teaches computer graphics in the Computer Science and Engineering department.

In a wide-ranging conversation about the future of visual computing, they discuss the advances on which they are working in distinct areas such as computer graphics, computer vision, computational imaging and augmented and virtual reality – and the kinds of devices and applications we’ll be seeing in the future.